Do you compose cinematic and orchestral music, and love the sound of those huge and powerful percussion instruments and drums in the orchestra?
The recorded space (room acoustics) that is naturally captured in the samples of cinematic and orchestral sample libraries have that huge sense of depth.
But there is one drawback: they lack the focus and clarity of modern drum kit. So why not mix the best of both worlds?
Orchestral Percussion boosted by a Drum Kit
To be honest, this is not an original idea, and have been done even in famous movie soundtracks by composers like Hans Zimmer, Ramin Djawadi and others who are not afraid of experimenting with creative layering and sound design.
The punchy and focused sound of an acoustic drum kit played by a rock or even heavy metal drummer, can add a huge boost of energy and power to the depth and majestic sound of the orchestral percussion section.
Since most of us use plugins and sample libraries, you can simply take an acoustic drum kit plugin, and then blend it in with the orchestral sound by adding reverb.
However, the orchestral percussion already have that sense of depth and space, so you don’t have to go overboard with the added drum kit reverb, as the point is to keep the punch, focus and clarity of those drum hits.
My favorite acoustic drum kit plugins are:
If you want to take this layering experiment to the next level, you can even try layering several drums of the same type, so it sounds like for example 3 bass drums played in unison. There are even some sample libraries that have done this in real recordings.
One of my favorite drum libraries that use this “multiple drummers sound” is: Medusa Drums by Musical Sampling.
Finally, sometimes I even layer crisp, dry and punchy electronic drums for extra focus, especially on low range drums like bass drums and big cinematic hits.
My favorite electronic drum plugin is old but still powerful: Stylus RMX by Spectrasonics.